Danny Grossman: CEO mixes toys, social commitments

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, June 25, 2003

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Danny Grossman: CEO mixes toys, social commitments

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Starting today, and continuing each Wednesday, we will publish short profiles of Bay Area businesspeople you should know. She could be an entrepreneur or work for a well-established firm. He could be a CEO or a shop owner. They could be starting companies or shutting them down. They could be bankers, bakers, rogues, regulators, geeks, graybeards, techies or tie-dyers. But, famous or obscure, they will all have a story to tell about what it's like doing business on the bay at the western edge of the continent.

His arms and legs are nearly as skinny as the 5-iron he's swinging. His playing partners aren't customers, but employees. And when he tees up a shot on the fairway, it's not unusual to see him miss the ball completely.

Golf is obviously not Grossman's game -- toys are. The founder and chief executive officer of San Francisco's Wild Planet Toys takes greater delight playing spy games with his sons, Noah, 7, and Jonah, 4, than he does in his annual outing at Petaluma's Adobe Creek Golf Course.

But Grossman happily hacked up the course Friday in support of an employee who organizes the tourney.

Grossman, 45, relishes his role as an unconventional CEO. He certainly brings an unconventional background: He was once an aggressive advocate for human rights in the Soviet Union, serving as a foreign service diplomat in Leningrad.

He comes from a family with a deep social commitment: His father and brother are pediatricians, his mother was a pediatric nurse, and his sisters are academics -- one is a professor of education at Stanford University, and the other is an administrator at the University of Rhode Island.

Now that he's grown and living only three blocks from his childhood home in San Francisco's West Portal neighborhood, Grossman brings that social commitment to his life as a businessman.

His company strives toward social responsibility, but he doesn't claim to practice it. "You can't operate perfectly in an imperfect world," he said.

For instance, Wild Planet outsources its manufacturing to factories in China. Grossman defends the practice both as necessary to bring affordable toys to the U.S. mass market and as a step to improving conditions in China.

"Providing jobs to Chinese people can be a good thing," Grossman said.

With the toys, however, he hopes to bring things to market that are not sexist or violent and that can inspire children's imagination. He is particularly proud of how Wild Planet involves children in inventing the toys and pays them royalties.

The company is best known for its Spy Gear and Undercover Girl lines of toys -- it has sold more than 2 million spy vision goggles with lights for night vision.

Grossman also wants to make his company a rewarding place to work. Employee input is sought on most major decisions; employees may volunteer with nonprofits on company time; there are many perks (from the golf outing and picnics to going to movies like "Finding Nemo"); and, even though the company is private, its books are open to employees.

Those who check the financials see rapid growth: In 2001, Wild Planet recorded about $28 million in revenue, which jumped to $50 million in 2002, Grossman said. The Financial District company has racked up profit for seven straight years.

It employs 60 people, most in its crammed headquarters on Battery Street (a move is in the works for next year) with about 10 in Hong Kong.

That's successful enough for a business wizard like San Francisco financier Warren Hellman to pick Wild Planet as one of his personal investments.

"The company has done really well in a tough toy environment," Hellman said,

and Grossman is a "phenomenal guy. . . . He combines being a guy who can build a profitable company and be involved in his community, which I like a ton," he said.

Grossman credits his philosophy with his upbringing. "None of my family is in business," he said. "Everybody is in public service or at a nonprofit."

His father was a Russian Jewish emigre who rose to become the chief of pediatrics at San Francisco General Hospital (San Francisco's shelter for children in need of urgent foster care is named in Moses Grossman's honor), and his mother worked in public health.

Even as a child, though, he showed an entrepreneurial bent. "I used to catch bumblebees and sell them to people," he said. When he realized that people didn't really want bees, but bought them just because they thought the kid selling them was cute, "I switched to a wishing well, cutting my cost of goods and increasing my margins."

His siblings entered a contest to sell chocolate to raise money for a Lowell High School trip to Japan -- with the winner getting to send a family member on the trip. "I sold thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of chocolate," Grossman said, enabling his mother to go on the trip. "It was the thrill of the sell.'

Yet when Grossman went to Yale University, he nurtured a lifelong fascination with Russian culture, earning a bachelor's degree in Russian and East European studies. He followed the family calling, first at a nonprofit and then as a congressional aide, until he was accepted into the U.S. Foreign Service.

His first posting was to India, but his dream came true with an assignment to the Soviet Union in 1985.

Grossman had a blast in Leningrad, daring his American visitors to eat sturgeon pizza or go to a Russian bathhouse, where they'd be whipped with birch branches.

But mostly, he relentlessly fought for refuseniks and political prisoners. As a result, "I was by far the most harassed person in the consulate. . . . My license was revoked. My windshield was smashed on Yom Kippur. People I met with were interrogated."

He was ultimately expelled in 1986, along with numerous other embassy attaches, after the United States had expelled a number of accused Soviet spies. The State Department sent him to Vienna to negotiate human rights and arms control.

By the end of a year, tens of thousands of refuseniks and hundreds of political prisoners were released.

Grossman felt his work was done, and he needed to find his way back to his community.

He enrolled at Stanford in pursuit of an MBA, thinking the education might be useful in a return to government service, and he joined a couple of nonprofit boards. But Mel Ziegler, a co-founder of Banana Republic who had befriended Grossman in Leningrad, tipped him to the nascent movement of socially responsible businesses, exemplified by companies like Ben and Jerry's and Working Assets.

Grossman interned at the Social Venture Network and went on to work for a toy company, Aviva Sports, as director of international sales and marketing. He left Aviva after two years, in 1993, after it was acquired by Mattel.

He founded Wild Planet that year, with two other Aviva alumni. The company ultimately caught fire with a line of nature exploration gear.

Since then, Grossman and his wife, Linda Gerard, have had two boys, who serve as freelance product testers and designers.

He still makes time for many nonprofit boards.

Signature moments for Wild Planet include seizing on the inspiration of Shahid Minipara, a child Grossman met on a community service mission, and of Richie Stachowski, a Moraga 13-year-old who sold his company to Wild Planet. Wild Planet began a Kid Inventor Challenge and found its true reason for being.

"Mel Ziegler says, 'You discover your company some way down the path,' " Grossman said. "We're still discovering. The way kids fuel their imagination inspires us."

DANNY GROSSMAN

Age: 45

Job: Chief executive, Wild Planet Toys

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First job: Legislative aide to Rep. James Coyne, R-Pa. (1981-83)

Quote: "I'm very juvenile in many ways -- my attention span, my humor, my love of physical activity. And when I was a kid, I loved toys. There are kids who like to read, or play sports. I love toys."

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